Gravity's Rainbow (49 page)

At PISCES it is widely believed that the Schwarzkommando have been summoned, in the
way demons may be gathered in, called up to the light of day and earth by the now
defunct Operation Black Wing. You can bet Psi Section was giggling about this for
a while. Who could have guessed there’d be
real
black rocket troops? That a story made up to scare last year’s enemy should prove
to be literally true—and no way now to stuff them back in the bottle or even say the
spell backward: no one ever knew the complete spell—different people knew different
parts of it, that’s what teamwork
is. . . .
By the time it occurs to them to look back through the Most Secret documentation surrounding
Operation Black Wing, to try and get some idea of how this all might’ve happened,
they will find, curiously, that certain critical documents are either missing or have
been updated past the end of the Operation, and that it is impossible at this late
date to reconstruct the spell at all, though there will be the usual elegant and bad-poetic
speculation. Even earlier speculation will be lopped and tranquilized. Nothing will
remain, for example, of the tentative findings of Freudian Edwin Treacle and his lot,
who toward the end even found themselves at odds with their own minority, the psychoanalytic
wing of Psi Section. It began as a search for some measurable basis for the common
experience of being haunted by the dead. After a while colleagues began to put in
chits requesting they be transferred out. Un-pleasantries such as “It’s beginning
to sound like the Tavistock Institute around here” began muttering up and down the
basement halls. Palace revolts, many of them conceived in ornamentally splendid flashes
of paranoia, brought locksmiths and welders in by droves, led to mysterious shortages
of office supplies, even of water and heat . . . none of which kept Treacle and lot
from carrying on in a Freudian, not to mention Jungian frame of mind. Word of the
Schwarzkommando’s real existence reached them a week before V-E Day. Individual events,
who really said what to whom, have been lost in the frenzy of accusation, crying,
nervous breakdowns, and areas of bad taste that followed. Someone remembers Gavin
Trefoil, face as blue as Krishna, running through the topiary trees stark naked, and
Treacle chasing him with an ax, screaming “Giant
ape?
I’ll show
you
a giant ape all right!”

Indeed he would show the critter to many of us, though we would not look. In his innocence
he saw no reason why co-workers on an office project should not practice self-criticism
with the same rigor as revolutionary cells do. He had not meant to offend sensibilities,
only to show the others, decent fellows all, that their feelings about blackness were
tied to feelings about shit, and feelings about shit to feelings about putrefaction
and death. It seemed to him so clear . . . why wouldn’t they listen? Why wouldn’t
they admit that their repressions
had
, in a sense that Europe in the last weary stages of its perversion of magic has lost,
had
incarnated real and living men, likely (according to the best intelligence) in possession
of real and living weapons, as the dead father who never slept with you, Penelope,
returns night after night to your bed, trying to snuggle in behind you . . . or as
your unborn child wakes
you
, crying in the night and you feel its ghost-lips at your breast . . . they are real,
they are living, as you pretend to scream inside the Fist of the Ape . . . but looking
over now at the much more likely candidate, cream-skinned Katje under the Wheel of
Fortune, who is herself getting ready now to bolt down the beach and into the relative
calm of the switchback railway. Pointsman is hallucinating. He has lost control. Pointsman
is supposed to have absolute control over Katje. Where does this leave her? In a control
that is out of control. Not even back in the leather and pain of gemütlich Captain
Blicero’s world has she felt as terrified as now.

Roger Mexico is taking it personally, oh-I-say, only trying to help. . . .

What the somewhat disconnected Mr. Pointsman has been hearing all this time is a voice,
strangely familiar, a voice he once imagined a face in a well-known news photograph
from the War to have:

“Here is what you have to do. You need Mexico now, more than ever. Your winter anxieties
about the End of History seem now all well comforted to rest, part of your biography
now like any old bad dream. But like Lord Acton always sez, History is not woven by
innocent hands. Mexico’s girl friend there is a threat to your whole enterprise. He
will do anything to hold on. Scowling and even cursing him she will nevertheless seduce
him away, into a civilian fogbank in which you will lose him and never find him—not
unless you act now, Pointsman. Operation Backfire is sending ATS girls out to the
Zone now. Rocket girls: secretarial and even minor technical duties at the Cuxhaven
test range. You have only to drop a word to SPOG, through Dennis Joint here, and Jessica
Swanlake is out of your way. Mexico may complain for a while, but all the more reason
for him, given the proper direction, to Lose Himself In His Work, eh? Remember the
eloquent words of Sir Denis Nayland Smith to young Alan Sterling, whose fiancée is
in the clutches of the insidious yellow Adversary: ‘I have been through the sort of
fires which are burning you now, Sterling, and I have always found that work was the
best ointment for the burns.’ And we both know what Nayland Smith represents, mm?
don’t we.”

“I do,” sez Pointsman, aloud, “but I can’t really say that you do, can I, if I don’t
even know who you
are
, you see.”

This strange outburst does not reassure Pointsman’s companions. They begin to edge
away, in definite alarm. “We should find a doctor,” murmurs Dennis Joint, winking
at Katje like a blond crewcut Groucho Marx. Jessica, forgetting her sulk, takes Roger’s
arm.

“You see, you see,” the voice starts up again, “she feels that she’s protecting him,
against you.
How many chances does one get to
be
a synthesis, Pointsman? East and West, together in the same bloke? You can not only
be Nayland Smith, giving a young lad in a funk wholesome advice about the virtues
of work, but you also, at the same time, get to be
Fu Manchu!
eh? the one who has the young lady in his power! How’s
that?
Protagonist and antagonist in one. I’d jump at it, if I were you.”

Pointsman is about to retort something like, “But you’re
not
me,” only he sees how the others all seem to be goggling at him. “Oh, ha, ha,” he
sez instead. “Talking to myself, here. Little—sort of—eccentricity, heh, heh.”

“Yang and Yin,” whispers the Voice, “Yang and Yin. . . .”

3

In the Zone

Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more. . . .

—D
OROTHY
, arriving in Oz

• • • • • • •

W
E ARE SAFELY PAST THE DAYS
of the Eis-Heiligen—St. Pancratius, St. Servatius, St. Bonifacius, die kalte Sophie . . .
they hover in clouds above the vineyards, holy beings of ice, ready with a breath,
an intention, to ruin the year with frost and cold. In certain years, especially War
years, they are short on charity, peevish, smug in their power: not quite saintly
or even Christian. The prayers of growers, pickers and wine enthusiasts must reach
them, but there’s no telling how the ice-saints feel—coarse laughter, pagan annoyance,
who understands this rear-guard who preserve winter against the revolutionaries of
May?

They found the countryside, this year, at peace by a scant few days. Already vines
are beginning to grow back over dragon’s teeth, fallen Stukas, burned tanks. The sun
warms the hillsides, the rivers fall bright as wine. The saints have refrained. Nights
have been mild. The frost didn’t come. It is the spring of peace. The vintage, God
granting at least a hundred days of sun, will be fine.

Nordhausen puts less credence in the ice-saints than do wine regions farther south,
but even here the season looks promising. Rain blows scattering out over the town
as Slothrop comes in in the early morning, bare feet, blistering and reblistering,
cooled here in the wet grass. There’s sunlight up on the mountains. His shoes got
lifted by some DP with fingers lighter than dreams, on one of the many trains since
the Swiss border, someplace rolling across Bavaria fast asleep. Whoever it was left
a red tulip between Slothrop’s toes. He has taken it for a sign. A reminder of Katje.

Signs will find him here in the Zone, and ancestors will reassert themselves. It’s
like going to that Darkest Africa to study the natives there, and finding their quaint
superstitions taking you over. In fact, funny thing, Slothrop just the other night
ran into an African, the first one he ever met in his life. Their discussion on top
of the freight car in the moonlight lasted only a minute or two. Small talk for the
sudden background departure of Major Duane Marvy over the side bounce-clatter down
the cobbled fill into the valley—well, certainly nothing was said then of any Herero
beliefs about ancestors. Yet he feels his own, stronger now as borders fall away and
the Zone envelops him, his own WASPs in buckled black, who heard God clamoring to
them in every turn of a leaf or cow loose among apple orchards in autumn. . . .

Signs of Katje, and doubles too. One night he sat in a children’s play house on an
abandoned estate, feeding a fire from the hair of a blonde doll with lapis lazuli
eyes. He kept those eyes. A few days later he traded them for a ride and half a boiled
potato. Dogs barked far away, summerwind blew in the birches. He was on one of the
main arterials of the spring’s last dissolution and retreat. Somewhere nearby, one
of Major-General Kammler’s rocket units had together found corporate death, leaving
in their crippled military rage pieces, modules, airframe sections, batteries rotting,
paper secrets rained back into slurry. Slothrop follows. Any clue’s good enough to
hop a train for. . . .

The doll’s hair was human. The smell of it burning is horrible. Slothrop hears movement
from the other side of the fire. A ratcheting noise—he grabs his blanket, ready to
vault away out the empty window frame, expecting a grenade. Instead one of these little
brightly painted German toys, an orangutan on wheels comes ki-ki-ki-ing into the firelight,
spastic, head lolling, face in an idiot’s grin, steel knuckles scraping the floor.
It rolls nearly into the fire before the clockwork runs down, the wagging head coming
to dead center to stare at Slothrop.

He feeds the fire another tuft of golden hair. “Evening.”

Laughter, somewhere. A child. But old laughter.

“Come on out, I’m harmless.”

The ape is followed by a tiny black crow with a red beak, also on wheels, hopping,
cawing, flapping metal wings.

“Why are you burning my doll’s hair?”

“Well, it’s not her own hair, you know.”

“Father said it belonged to a Russian Jewess.”

“Why don’t you come in to the fire?”

“Hurts my eyes.” Winding again. Nothing moves. But a music box begins to play. The
tune is minor and precise. “Dance with me.”

“I can’t see you.”

“Here.” Out of the fire’s pale, a tiny frost-flower. He reaches and just manages to
find her hand, to grasp her little waist. They begin their stately dance. He can’t
even tell if he’s leading.

He never saw her face. She felt like voile and organdy.

“Nice dress.”

“I wore it for my first communion.” The fire died presently, leaving starlight and
a faint glow over some town to the east, through windows whose panes were all gone.
The music box still played, beyond the running time, it seemed, of an ordinary spring.
Their feet moved over clouded, crumbled old glass, torn silks, bones of dead rabbits
and kittens. The geometrical path took them among ballooning, ripped arrases, smelling
of dust and an older bestiary than the one by the fire . . . unicorns, chimaeras . . .
and what had he seen festooning the child-sized entranceway? Garlic bulbs? Wait—weren’t
they to keep away
vampires?
A faint garlic smell reached him exactly then, an inbreaking of Balkan blood on the
air of his north, as he turned back to her to ask if she really was Katje, the lovely
little Queen of Transylvania. But the music had run down. She had vaporized from his
arms.

Well here he is skidded out onto the Zone like a planchette on a Ouija board, and
what shows up inside the empty circle in his brain might string together into a message,
might not, he’ll just have to see. But he can feel a sensitive’s fingers, resting
lightly but sure on his days, and he thinks of them as Katje’s.

He’s still Ian Scuffling, war (peace?) correspondent, though back in British uniform
these days, with plenty of time on these trains to hash over in his mind the information
Mario Schweitar bootlegged for him back there in Zürich. There is a fat file on Imipolex
G, and it seems to point to Nordhausen. The engineer on the customer end of the Imipolex
contract was one Franz Pökler. He came to Nordhausen in early ’44, as the rocket was
going into mass production. He was billeted in the Mittelwerke, an underground factory
complex run largely by the SS. No word on where he went when the plant was evacuated
in February and March. But Ian Scuffling, ace reporter, will be sure to find a clue
down in the Mittelwerke.

Slothrop sat in the swaying car with thirty other cold and tattered souls, eyes all
pupil, lips cratered with sores. They were singing, some of them. A lot of them kids.
It is a Displaced Person’s song, and Slothrop will hear it often around the Zone,
in the encampments, out on the road, in a dozen variations:

If you see a train this evening,

Far away against the sky,

Lie down in your wooden blanket,

Sleep, and let the train go by.

Trains have called us, every midnight,

From a thousand miles away,

Trains that pass through empty cities,

Trains that have no place to stay.

No one drives the locomotive,

No one tends the staring light,

Trains have never needed riders,

Trains belong to bitter night.

Railway stations stand deserted,

Rights-of-way lie clear and cold:

What we left them, trains inherit,

Trains go on, and we grow old.

Let them cry like cheated lovers,

Let their cries find only wind.

Trains are meant for night and ruin.

We are meant for song, and sin.

Pipes are passing around. Smoke hangs from the damp wood slats, is whipped out cracks
into the night slipstream. Children wheeze in their sleep, the rachitic babies cry . . .
now and then the mothers exchange a word. Slothrop huddles inside his paper misfortune.

The Swiss firm’s dossier on L. (for Laszlo) Jamf listed all his assets at the time
he came to work in Zürich. Apparently he had sat—as token scientist—on the board of
directors of the Grössli Chemical Corporation as late as 1924. Among stock options
and pieces of this firm and that back in Germany—pieces to be gathered in over the
next year or two by the octopus IG—was the record of a transaction between Jamf and
Mr. Lyle Bland, of Boston, Massachusetts.

On the beam, Jackson. Lyle Bland is a name he knows, all right. And a name that also
shows up often in the private records Jamf kept of his own business deals. Seems that
Bland, during the early twenties, was heavily involved with the Hugo Stinnes operation
in Germany. Stinnes, while he lasted, was the Wunderkind of European finance. Based
out of the Ruhr, where his family had been coal barons for generations, young Stinnes
built up a good-sized empire of steel, gas, electric and water power, streetcars and
barge lines before he was 30. During the World War he worked closely with Walter Rathenau,
who was ramrodding the whole economy then. After the war Stinnes managed to put the
horizontal electrical trust of Siemens-Schuchert together with the coal and iron supplies
of the Rheinelbe Union into a super-cartel that was both horizontal and vertical,
and to buy into just about everything else—shipyards, steamship lines, hotels, restaurants,
forests, pulp mills, newspapers—meantime also speculating in currency, buying foreign
money with marks borrowed from the Reichsbank, driving the mark down and then paying
off the loans at a fraction of the original figure. More than any one financier he
was blamed for the Inflation. Those were the days when you carried marks around in
wheelbarrows to your daily shopping and used them for toilet paper, assuming you had
anything to shit. Stinnes’s foreign connections went all over the world—Brazil, the
East Indies, the United States—businessmen like Lyle Bland found his growth rate irresistible.
The theory going around at the time was that Stinnes was conspiring with Krupp, Thyssen,
and others to ruin the mark and so get Germany out of paying her war debts.

Bland’s connection was vague. Jamf’s records mention that he had negotiated contracts
for supplying tons of private currency known as Notgeld to Stinnes and colleagues,
as well as “Mefo bills” to the Weimar Republic—another of Hjalmar Schacht’s many bookkeeping
dodges to keep official records clear of any hint of weapons procurement banned under
the terms of Versailles. Some of these banknote contracts were let to a certain Massachusetts
paper mill, on whose board Lyle Bland happened to sit.

The name of this contractor was the Slothrop Paper Company.

He reads his name without that much surprise. It belongs here, as do the most minor
details during déjà vu. Instead of any sudden incidence of light (even in the shape
of a human being: golden and monitory light), as he stares at these eight ink marks,
there passes a disagreeable stomach episode, a dread tangible as vomit beginning to
assert itself—the same vertigo that overtook him one day long ago in the Himmler-Spielsaal.
A gasbag surrounds his head, rubbery, vast, pushing in from all sides, that feeling
we know, yes, but . . . He is also getting a hardon, for no immediate reason. And
there’s that
smell
again, a smell from before his conscious memory begins, a soft and chemical smell,
threatening, haunting, not a smell to be found out in the world—
it is the breath of the Forbidden Wing . . .
essence of all the still figures waiting for him inside, daring him to enter and find
a secret he cannot survive.

Once something was done to him, in a room, while he lay helpless. . . .

His erection hums from a certain distance, like an instrument installed, wired by
Them into his body as a colonial outpost here in our raw and clamorous world, another
office representing Their white Metropolis far away. . . .

A sad story, all right. Slothrop, very nervous by now, reads on. Lyle Bland, eh? Well,
sure, that fits. He can recall dimly once or twice having seen Uncle Lyle. The man
used to come to visit his father, affable, fair-haired, a hustler in the regional
Jim Fisk style. Bland was always picking young Tyrone up and swinging him around by
his feet. That was O.K.—Slothrop had no special commitment at the time to right side
up.

From what it sez here, Bland either saw the Stinnes crash coming before most of its
other victims, or was just naturally nervous. Early in ’23 he began to sell off his
interests in the Stinnes operations. One of these sales was made through Laszlo Jamf
to the Grössli Chemical Corporation (later Psychochemie AG). One of the assets transferred
in this sale was “all interest in Schwarzknabe enterprise. Seller agrees to continue
surveillance duties until such time as Schwindel operative can be relieved by purchaser
equivalent, acceptability to be determined by seller.”

Jamf’s codebook happens to be in the dossier. Part of the man’s personality structure,
after all. “Schwindel” was his code name for Hugo Stinnes. Clever sense of humor,
the old fart. Across from “Schwarzknabe,” now, are the initials “T.S.”

Well, holy cow, Slothrop reckons, that must be me, huh. Barring the outside possibility
of Tough Shit.

Listed as a “Schwarzknabe” liability is the unpaid remainder of a bill to Harvard
University, about $5000 worth including the interest, “as per agreement (oral) with
Schwarzvater.”

“Schwarzvater” is the code word for “B.S.” Which, barring the outside possibility
of Bull Shit, seems to be Slothrop’s own father, Broderick. Blackfather Slothrop.

Nice way to find out your father made a deal 20 years ago with somebody to spring
for your education. Come to think of it, Slothrop never could quite put the announcements,
all through the Depression, of imminent family ruin, together with the comfort he
enjoyed at Harvard. Well, now, what
was
the deal between his father and Bland? I’ve been sold, Jesus Christ I’ve been sold
to IG Farben like a side of beef. Surveillance? Stinnes, like every industrial emperor,
had his own company spy system. So did the IG. Does this mean Slothrop has been under
their observation—m-maybe since he was
born?
Yaahhh . . .